Applaud the military on VE Day for their unsung efforts to beat Covid

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The Army has been vital in, among other things, establishing the Nightingale hospitals

It is an immense shame that the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day this Friday cannot be celebrated in a fitting manner. We will necessarily be confined to our homes and gardens, while 8 May 1945 was a day of vast crowds, unrestrained celebration and public joy. Even in the midst of our current world crisis, it is hard to imagine the sense of liberation and relief at the defeat of a threat to the very existence of the country and of much of decent civilisation.

Yet of course we can find in VE Day some lessons and comfort relevant to today. It reminds us that even the most lethal attack can be repelled with inspiration and endurance. And it encourages us to salute the efforts of those engaged in unflagging service to others. Every day of the week it is NHS workers and carers who are rightly praised and recognised for sacrifice and extraordinary effort. But this Friday will also be an appropriate time to show appreciation of our armed forces in the present national effort. Their role is more extensive, more crucial, and more versatile than is usually acknowledged.

As far as I can tell, not a single one of the huge challenges facing the country in recent weeks could have been surmounted without military involvement. The Nightingale hospitals have sprung up at amazing speed because of the skill of army engineers and others, including military joiners and carpenters, air-conditioning and refrigeration engineers, medical experts and electrical engineers. This is not just a case of sending round some plumbers at high speed – although their military equivalents have indeed been heavily involved. It is the armed forces who contribute geospatial planners to work out where to site the new hospitals – showing that we soon fall back on the brains of the army as well as their brawn.

Equally, the frantic battle to keep health workers supplied with personal protective equipment, PPE, would have been a hopeless one without military help. The RAF have been collecting shipments from overseas and army logisticians and drivers have worked on deliveries across the UK. Again, the ability to plan, think and organise has been important, with considerable military co-ordination of contractors. In the intense drive to increase the availability of testing, the army has also been vital, creating in recent days nearly a hundred mobile testing units, without any prior notice, that will now enable many thousands of healthcare workers to be tested without undertaking long journeys.

The military contribution to this national effort runs to more than 80 current tasks. Some of those are high profile, such as helicopters lifting sick patients from the Orkneys and the Channel Islands. But others are little known to the general public, including procuring ventilators, mentoring local resilience forums, providing ambulance drivers, operating warehouses and repairing oxygen systems in hospitals.

Previous civil emergencies in this century have shown the need to use military skill and resources – their role in handling the Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001 was much praised, and the floods of 2007 saw them handing out three million bottles of water a day. This, however, is the first time in decades that they have been so invaluable to the internal functioning of the country. There is a strong case for the whole nation to applaud the job they are doing, not just to thank them but to draw attention to the values, ethos and adaptability of services that get on with their job in a typically understated and good-humoured way. This week is the opportunity for Boris Johnson to draw attention to their work, and for Keir Starmer to join in – thereby underlining that he is not Jeremy Corbyn.

Sadly, there is also a wider and more disturbing reason to think about the future of our armed forces this week: the Covid-19 crisis is not seeing the world become a safer place. Far from bringing humanity together, it is providing cover for unwelcome and dangerous manoeuvres. In the South China Sea, tensions have increased between China on the one hand and Vietnam and Indonesia on the other. In the Gulf, where British ships patrol, Iran has just put its first military satellite into orbit. Disinformation has flowed out of China, following a pattern already well-established in the case of Russia. Globally, the race to develop more advanced weapons, drawing on artificial intelligence, or travelling at hypersonic speeds, is accelerating. The need to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, now that North Korea has assembled its own arsenal, is greater than ever.

So as many of our service men and women rush around helping us withstand coronavirus, their colleagues cannot neglect their normal duties. There are probably many people who imagine that when we are not engaged in a major war, the armed forces have a break and polish their equipment. In reality they are deployed each year to dozens of countries on a multitude of tasks.

Currently, they maintain our continuous-at-sea nuclear deterrent, patrol the North Atlantic, protect the overseas territories, and deploy in Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa. Aggression by Russia means they provide part of the Nato response – with army units in Estonia and RAF air policing based in Lithuania. And all the time our own air space has to be defended against the deliberate intrusions of Russian aircraft and the danger of terrorist attack. If any political party thinks we should be cutting defence when the bills for Covid-19 come in, they should forget it.

Like the vast majority of British people alive today, I have never served in our armed forces. However, I was privileged to get to know them at close quarters when I was foreign secretary, whether visiting bases in Helmand or being airlifted at high speed into the middle of Baghdad. After a few years of that, they became the arm of the British state that I admired the most.

Yet as our forces have become numerically smaller, fewer people than ever are familiar with what they do. In the years to come, a safe, cohesive and well-protected country is going to need to put that right. VE Day is not a bad time to start, as we live through another dark period in which we cannot do without the military skills and dedication so often taken for granted.